Donald Trump has claimed 99 percent of COVID-19 infections are harmless as infections surge in the United States, alarming experts who say it downplays the risk the rapidly spreading virus poses.
The US President was speaking at an Independence Day 4th of July event at the White House when he tried to minimise the virus' threat.
"Now we have tested almost 40 million people. By so doing, we show cases, 99 percent of which are totally harmless. Results that no other country can show because no other country has the testing that we have, not in terms of the numbers or in terms of quality."
According to a Worldometer table, the US is second in the world for total tests and 25th for tests per million people.
In his speech, Trump may have been referring to a statistic released this week by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that the hospitalisation rate in the US is 102.5 per 100,000 people.
But this rate is calculated by the number of residents of a defined area who are hospitalised with COVID-19, divided by the total population of the entire area, not just those who have tested positive.
US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) commissioner Dr Scott Gottlieb told CBS he estimated that when all cases were counted, including asymptomatic ones, between 2 and 5 percent of infected people become sick enough to require hospitalisation.
Experts are also concerned Trump's statement doesn't consider the risk posed by those carrying the virus.
The New York Times reported experts said even those who tested positive for coronavirus but show no symptoms should not be considered harmless as they can unwittingly transmit the virus to others in the community who are more vulnerable and may develop an acute illness.
The United States has also seen cases increase significantly with the number of infections now regularly topping 50,000 per day, higher than in April when the US was in the first grip of infections, the Guardian reported.
The country also currently has the largest number of cases per country with 2.8 million infections, 1 million more than the second most infected country Brazil, and are nearing 130,000 deaths.
During Sunday's speech, Trump also warned that China will be "held accountable" for the virus.
"We got hit by the virus that came from China," he said. "We've made a lot of progress. Our strategy is moving along well. It goes out in one area, it rears back its ugly face in another area. But we've learned a lot. We've learned how to put out the flame."
In a video message posted on the White House's Twitter account, Trump said the US had been "doing better than any country had ever done in history... and then we got hit with this terrible plague from China".
"Now we're getting close to fighting our way out of it," he said.
"We're on the way to a tremendous victory... our country will be greater than ever before."
